Blogs|Feb 12, 2011

Disabling the Visual Studio Source Server Security Warning Dialog

The estimable Ed Blankenship posted a must read article for everyone using TFS 2010: Source Server and Symbol Server Support in TFS 2010. Bookmark that article because it’s the one stop shop for all the best practices for symbol server, source indexing, and everything related to them for VS and TFS 2010. Once you get…
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Blogs|Feb 8, 2011

Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #5

Quick: can you spot what’s wrong with this XAML?   <ProgressBar x:Name=”Progress” Visibility=”Collapsed” IsIndeterminate=”True” />   If you answered that setting IsIndeterminant to true on a ProgressBar control in Silverlight for Windows Phone debilitates performance, go to the head of the class! If not, read on. If you use Silverlight for Windows Phone’s networking stack…
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Blogs|Feb 4, 2011

ASUS Eee Slate EP121 Review

Looking over the offerings at CES 2011, the ASUS Eee Slate EP121 caught my eye as I had been looking for a replacement slate computer since my beloved Motion M1400 found a new home with my niece. I ordered one as soon as it was available and I got it arrived this week. Tablet computers…
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Blogs|Jan 26, 2011

Using Home Server? Be Careful with the WHS V1 Update Release 2 (KB981089)

As I always have Process Explorer running in tray area, I noticed that with my computer doing nothing, the CPU icon was showing constant 10%-12% CPU utilization. It was one of the many SRVHOST.EXE processes, and running the RPC Endpoint Mapper Service and the Remote Procedure Call Service. Looking at it deeper, I saw there…
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Blogs|Jan 25, 2011

Install a New Virtual Directory to Default Web Site with WiX

Sometimes the internet is totally awesome and other times it’s a complete morass of “how come I can’t find anything?” Recently, I needed to build a quick installer that did nothing more than install new virtual directory under the ubiquitous Default Web Site. I thought installing a basic web site would have been a very…
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Blogs|Jan 25, 2011

Using the Location Service in Silverlight for Windows Phone

One of the most exciting features of the Windows phone from a developer’s perspective is the location service. The location service is a set of APIs that rely on Assisted-GPS (A-GPS), Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), and cell-site triangulation to expose location data to an application. Simply put, this means that a Windows phone app can…
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Blogs|Jan 20, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 4

The first three articles in this series presented three different ways to respond to touch input in Windows phone apps: mouse events, Touch.FrameReported events, and manipulation events. In this, the fourth and final installment, we’ll discuss a means for processing touch input that trumps all three – namely, the GestureListener class in the Silverlight for…
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Blogs|Jan 19, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described how to build touch interfaces for phone apps using mouse events and Touch.FrameReported events. Part 3 presents yet another way to respond to touch input: manipulation events. Manipulation events originated in WPF, and they’re substantially richer in WPF than in Silverlight for Windows Phone.…
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Blogs|Jan 18, 2011

Jounce Part 10: Visual State Manager

One of the most common questions I get about Jounce is how to handle transitions, since the ContentControl immediately swaps out content. There are some third-party solutions, such as the TransitioningContentControl from the Silverlight toolkit, but Jounce can also handle this right out of the box. Take a look at an example: View example in…
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Blogs|Dec 30, 2010

Signal-to-Noise Ratio, ROI and ROA in Software Development

I normally focus on very technical posts with a lot of code. Recently, I’ve been asked a few questions and had some interesting conversations that prompted this more philosophical post. I’d like to take a step back and look at the software development process in general and you as the specific developer, to share some…
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Blogs|Dec 18, 2010

Installing Windows Azure SDK v1.3 Breaks Support for Visual Studio 2008

Be aware that installing the November 2010 Windows Azure SDK v1.3 will break support for cloud projects running under Visual Studio 2008. To the best of my knowledge this was not widely announced (in fact, I learned about this fact during installation of the SDK). If you have Visual Studio 2008 Windows Azure projects, you’ll…
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